Thermal Dark Matter from Freezeout of Inverse Decays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new thermal dark matter candidate, 'INDY', whose relic abundance is set by inverse decay freezeout, characterized by extremely weak couplings that evade traditional detection methods but can be explored via long-lived particle searches.

Contribution

It presents a novel dark matter model based on inverse decay freezeout with exponentially small couplings, offering new avenues for experimental detection.

Findings

Relic abundance depends on decay width parametrically.

Couplings are exponentially small, making dark matter very weakly interacting.

Potential detection through long-lived particle decay searches.

Abstract

We propose a new thermal dark matter candidate whose abundance is determined by the freezeout of inverse decays. The relic abundance depends parametrically only on a decay width, while matching the observed value requires that the coupling determining the width-and the width itself-should be exponentially small. The dark matter is therefore very weakly coupled to the Standard Model, evading conventional searches. This INverse DecaY ('INDY') dark matter can be discovered by searching for the long-lived particle that decays into the dark matter at future planned experiments.